Monday, October 11, 2010

I've only read the first two chapters of the 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More written by Stever Robbins (downloadable at http://www.getitdoneguysnews.com/) and if the remaining chapters are close to the quality of the first two chapters, this will be a must have business book.

Chapter or Step 1 is on living and working on purpose. Finding a purpose for one's personal and professional life by developing a Life Map is a great, workable idea to get people to sit down and map out a mission, vision, goals, and steps to get where they want to be in life. I've read other books that suggest that you sit down and write our missions and visions and for some people that is too much like work and too confining. There are just some people who donot want to and cannot write.

Creating a visual life map is a great way to get it all out in the open and start working towards the main goal. Robbins also provides some good tips on identifying one's top goals both personal and professional.

Chapter 2 is about overcoming procrastination. As someone who has spent 32 years married to someone who procrastinates procrastinating, this chapter gave new and good tips on overcoming this much maligned condition. Turn tasks into habits. Break down tasks into chunks and using a life map to keep moving, are just really great ideas that can easily be followed without adding a bunch more work and time to one's life.

Check out the first two chapters of the book and take a look at the web site, both are written to read quickly and all provide some help for those that are drowning in work and can't remember why they are working so long and so hard.

In the new film Waiting for Superman -- which chronicles the collapse of the American educational system -- a forlorn mother waits in a gymnasium with thousands of other parents for her lottery number to be called. The drawing will determine which students will attend a good school, and which will be relegated to a failing institution. The mother explains the gravity of the situation: "It's the difference between whether my son goes to college, or goes to prison. . ."

How did we allow our educational systems to fall so far, so fast? When did the welfare of our children go the same way as healthcare, the safety of our food and the callous obliteration of our environment? How did we allow ourselves to become obese, dependent on antidepressants, and willing to wage inhumane wars over oil, land and beliefs?

Something is happening. Everyone knows we are leaving a worse world behind for our children.

But up to this point, we have been looking at these problems as separate issues. But would it surprise you to know that there is a dangerous commonality emerging -- an intricate interconnectedness between our seemingly intractable problems?

In The Watchman's Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction, I describe a context, a framework, an explanation, for our inability to address our greatest threats by going straight to the source of the problem. The book points to the fact that our most challenging problems have one frightening characteristic in common: they are so complex, so difficult to get our arms around, they may be beyond the capabilities the human brain has evolved to this point. After all, there is a limit to what our brains have physically evolved to fix.

In the book, I explain that complexity is a condition where there are many more wrong choices than right ones. So over time, we become "incompetent pickers" who can't determine which solutions will work.

When complexity makes it impossible to obtain facts and proceed on a rational basis, humans have a history of conveniently substituting facts with unproven beliefs. This substitution preceded the collapse of every great civilization before our time: it happened to the Mayans, the Romans, the Khmer, and the Egyptians. The powerful, pervasive beliefs and behaviors we adopt in lieu of facts are called supermemes (named after Richard Dawkin's 1976 discovery of memes.)

Which supermemes currently prevent progress in education? The Watchman's Rattle describes five universal behaviors that inhibit solving the problem once and for all:

1) Irrational Opposition: This occurs when people are more comfortable rejecting remedies rather than advocating solutions. If every solution which is proposed can be found to be flawed then none will be adopted. Simply put, across-the-board opposition results in gridlock.

2) Counterfeit Correlation: When we hastily determine the relationship between a cause and effect(s), this leads to an incorrect diagnosis our problems. We are left to pursue one ineffective remedy after another, all the while wasting precious time and resources as the problem continues to grow in magnitude. In the case of education, we have sited everything from outdated textbooks, the eradication of physical education, poor school lunch programs and low teacher salaries as the culprit -- but how many of these quick-fixes are based on valid scientific studies?

3) Personalization of Blame: As soon as we hold each individual accountable for debt, obesity, and depression, and other such issues, society is off the hook. Blame the parents for the fact that they aren't more involved in their children's education and the systemic problem doesn't have to be addressed.

4) Silo Thinking: In tackling complex, multi-dimensional problems, it is crucial that nations, organizations, and individuals work in tandem. Adopting a territorial mindset greatly impedes progress. In the case of education, why aren't neuroscientists who understand how the human brain learns part of the discussion? Does it make sense to fix education without first understanding how the brain loads content, solves problems and retains information?

5) Extreme Economics: The financial bottom line becomes the unilateral litmus test in determining which solutions are valid. Economic considerations drive decisions for everything, from hospital care, immigration policy, to whether each child needs a locker, computer or physical education. We begin to speak in economic terms such as "investing in our children's education." Really? Since when was education an investment? It was supposed to be a "right."

It must be obvious by now that reforming the education system is a complex problem that cannot be solved by simply raising teacher salaries, increasing parental participation, or providing schools with the latest technology. Quick fixes don't make a dent when it comes to highly complex problems. The solution to complexity is to launch a wide variety of rational, progressive and innovative solutions in tandem. Some will succeed, some will fail, but we avoid the problem of trying to pick the winners from the losers when we no longer have the capability to. If we launch solutions aimed at overcoming all five of the supermemes that stand in the way of progress, there will no longer be any need for worried parents to sit in a gymnasium and hope they get lucky.

When it comes to education, here's the bottom line: In the battle between Superman and the Supermemes, who comes out on top?

Rebecca Costa is a sociobiologist whose unique expertise is to spot and explain emerging trends in relationship to human evolution, global markets, and new technologies. Costa joins distinguished business leaders, Nobel Laureates, scientists, innovators and Pulitzer Prize -- winning authors from around the world to address growing concerns over dangerous threats such as global warming, pandemic viruses, terrorism, nuclear proliferation and failing public education. A popular speaker at thought-leader and technology conferences as well as major universities, Costa is the former CEO of Silicon Valley start-up Dazai Advertising, Inc. Costa's clients included technology giants such as Apple Computer, Hewlett- Packard, Oracle Corporation, 3M, Amdahl, Seibel Systems and General Electric. She graduated from the University of California with a BA in Social Sciences. Rebecca Costa lives on the central coast of California.

About WWT...Business Book Reviews

This is a blog about business book reviews. New titles, classic titles and a few books that one may not at first glance consider to be a business tool will be reviewed. Along the way, there will be reviews of other business related readings such as blogs, ebooks, articles, and magazines.

Highlighting quotes from great authors and writers is a favorite pastime and I'll try to share some of those with readers.

Here is a powerful quote I found in the book, It's Just Good Business, by Jeff Klein, "The Power of Purpose. Purpose is an activating, motivating and animating force. It moves us to get up in the morning, sustains us when times get tough and serves as a guiding star when we stray off course. Purposeful people build purposeful companies. And purposeful people make an impact through whatever their work or role may be."

I still can't bring myself to change out this quote so it will be hanging out for a while longer. Every time I think of changing it, I read it again and think what a powerful quote it really is and how it continues to keep me writing. It's from The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner,

"I will venture to say that all authors, at heart, are not so different from one another. All are driven by a desire to share their stories and ideas and to connect with poeple. All believe in the power of the written word and in the power of the book. The novelists wants to change people's lives by transporting them into a story; the journalist wants to find the story hidden in plain view; the self-help author wants to help people effect change in their lives. The greatest compliment any writer can hear from a reader are the words, Your book changed my life."

About Me

A freelance writer for over 25 years, I am continually amazed at how some writers can put together a group of words so that they can move a person to cry, laugh, or suddenly feel connected.
Every day, I read something - a book or article or blog that I want to put words to and write about!
I am a member of the Society of Professional Journalists and the National Book Critics Circle.
I also write for a number of local newspapers and I'm a book reviewer for blogcritics.org.